Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Scraps of Life, Clearly Still Vibrant

This interesting looking thing above is a block of wood with remnants of glue and fibers, the result of tearing off the sample rainbow colored pieces of linen in the picture below.

All that ripping and tearing of those pieces of rainbow colored linen left me with this:

A pile of colorful, fuzzy, interesting looking linen threads. I bet you can guess where this is heading...

It was time to make the weekly six-word memoir journal quiltlet, the 49th in the series, and I needed to clean up the debris to move onto another project. As I am most certainly not one to throw away a bunch of colorful threads, I had to use them by placing them on a small piece of backing fabric and a scrap of batting.

While working on how to contain the threads, I worked on the words for the piece which I wrote on a clear piece of plastic with a fine black Sharpie pen.

I used a piece of strapping tape over the words to seal them in as they didn't look like they'd ever dry. I did it quickly enough so that they didn't smear at all and trimmed the rectangle down to a small size.

I ended up using the stretchy, knit, plastic-y, possibly nylon covers that I saved from some get-well roses (one was on each bud) that were delivered by FTD. That's me, using up excess packaging since 1973!
I opened up several of the flower protectors so that they were able to be flat and stitched them down with rainbow variegated thread right on top of the mass of linen threads.

Lastly, the plastic rectangle with the words for the week were stitched down. The words are: Scraps of Life. Clearly Still Vibrant.
The result was lumpy and pulling in all directions and very messy around the edges. Just like the week!